Just inside the pastel green door of the Highgrove shop in Tetbury, where you might expect to pick up a wire shopping basket, tasteful brown cloth bags hang on a row of coat hooks. They set the tone for the products in a shop owned by an eco-minded, quality-conscious prince. From a teacup lovingly hand painted with wildflowers found in the Prince of Wales’s back garden, to a bar of soap hand-crafted by an old family business that he discovered during a tour of Lebanon, each item reflects the Prince’s tastes and each is personally approved before it goes on the shelf.

Highgrove House, the Prince of Wales’s Gloucestershire estate, which attracts more than 30,000 visitors to its famously organic garden in the 29 weeks of the year that it is open, is the main influence for most of the products in the Highgrove shops (as well as the one on the estate there is one a mile and a half down the road in Tetbury, and one that opened last year in Bath, as well as an online store). There are jars of spiced chutney hand-made with ingredients from the estate, as well as mud-encrusted produce from the royal vegetable patch and old-fashioned gardening tools such as wooden riddles made in Derbyshire.

'His Royal Highness is keen to support British artisans and small manufacturers who use traditional techniques to keep these traditions from dying out,’ Christine Prescott, the CEO of Highgrove Enterprises, explains. Her team rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and scour rural craft fairs to seek out British craftsmen who are committed to choosing their materials responsibly. Of 100 suppliers, 60 are individual artisans, such as Roger Newman, who makes rocking lambs from his local Welsh timber and fleeces. The remainder are medium-sized manufacturers such as Burleigh, the last Victorian working pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, and the Somerset Willow Company, one of the few remaining willow-weaving companies in Britain.

But there are two producers who have been hand picked for very specific reasons: 'The handmade Lebanese soap is there because it is His Royal Highness’s favourite,’ Prescott says. 'We also have some hand-embroidered napkins produced by a women’s co-operative in Vietnam.’

All profits go to the Prince’s Charities Foun­dation and last year garden tours and retail raised £420,000. As Prescott says, 'The Prince of Wales has long believed that businesses can be successful while also serving wider social and environmental interests, and that sentiment is reflected in every way through the Highgrove shops.’

Clambering up almost vertical steps to Roger Newman’s workshop in a converted chapel in the village of Gwernogle, south Wales, the first things you see are piles of wooden lamb’s heads in various stages of being carved. Rows of thick, fluffy fleeces hang on a beam. At the back of the workshop are two ancient Singer leather-sewing machines, where Newman, 65, and his wife, Judy, 50, sew the fleeces on to wooden bodies to create their signature product, the rocking lamb.

Newman invented the rocking lamb in 1967, when he was 21. A trained classical dancer, he did taxidermy in his spare time. 'I realised I wasn’t good enough at dancing so I made things to sell,’ he says. One day he stuffed a small, real sheep, which he had bought for £4, put it on wooden rockers and sold it to an antiques dealer for £12. 'The dealer came back almost the next day to order another one and I knew I had created a product that would sell,’ Newman says. A week later he started making the rocking lambs from wood covered in sheep fleeces and he has been selling them ever since.

Each rocking lamb takes about 12 hours to make. Newman gets a 25-ton delivery of Douglas fir, which grows locally on the hills, every four years ('Thank God it’s only every four years,’ Judy says). He mills the wood, air dries it naturally and saws it to size for the frame, which is then bolted together before the body is padded with wood wool (straw-like slivers of wood).

Newman buys the fleece from a local skin merchant. 'When it arrives we have to do a terrible thing called fleshing,’ he says, while Judy grimaces. 'It’s where we scrape the fat away from the skin.’ They then soak the skins overnight to clean them, rinse them by hand in a big butter churn and sew them on to the frames.

Newman used to make 500 lambs a year in the 1980s. 'I was just saying the other day how I would hate for them to be all sent back; they’d swamp the village,’ Judy laughs. Now the couple make only about 20 per year, in part because of the economic climate and also because increased travel costs have stopped them from showing at agricultural shows. So Newman has had to diversify into rocking horses – rows of which grin from the side of his workshop – and other products, such as a soap-cutting machine, which he designed himself and which is shipped around the world. Even so, turnover is down to £25,000 per year.

But since January, when they were first stocked by Highgrove, Newman has sold 10 lambs. They are special Highgrove lambs with the Prince of Wales’s crest stamped on their rockers, and come in two sizes: a large lamb with a white face (£595), which can take up to 20 stone in weight on its back, and a smaller, black-faced lamb (£350) for children. 'I don’t know how Highgrove found me, but it’s wonderful that they have and that we’ve been able to make and develop the lambs for them,’ Newman says.

'I hope their support will help my family to keep making quality products with local natural materials for many years to come.’

Julia Davey

Julia Davey hoists up the door of her studio, a converted garage attached to a Victorian mill outside Bath, to reveal a small but surprisingly light work space. The wall above her desk is covered in sketches and watercolours of plants taken from the garden at Highgrove, which have been the inspiration for her Highgrove Flora and Fauna ceramics collection.

Davey, 26, still can’t believe her luck. She graduated in ceramics from Bath Spa in June 2009 and started up her business while teaching full time at Cirencester College, Gloucestershire. Then in spring last year Highgrove contacted her out of the blue to ask if she would produce a range of ceramics for the shop. 'They said that they wanted to support someone local, and I was lucky that my name came up,’ she says. She was able to stop teaching.

Her first Highgrove order was delivered in February. 'I heard that the Prince of Wales was really fond of wildflowers and in particular the part of the garden where hundreds of camassias come up in spring,’ she explains. Her collection of cups and saucers (£22.50), mugs (£17.50), jugs (£17.50), coasters (£7.50) and teapots (£35) feature camassias, pink foxgloves, butterflies and 'a friendly bee’. 'Apparently Prince Charles really liked the strong blue of the camassias – so, phew…’ she says laughing.

She now makes about 400 items a month for Highgrove – and about the same number again for her other stockists, which are mainly small galleries and shops around Bath. This spring she spent £6,000 on a new kiln to help with production and ease pressure on her smaller kiln. Her turnover is 'less than £30,000’ a year, but she is expanding her business and next year will take on her first full-time member of staff. 'I had interest from Fortnum & Mason, but they wanted such a large quantity that I couldn’t do it; hopefully I will be able to soon.’

Each piece is cast from a mould given an initial firing before Davey hand-paints the bottom of the mug or jug a block colour. Further details are then scratched into the paint; the pieces are then fired, dipped by hand in glaze and fired again. Next she attaches drawings that have been scanned and printed on to transfer paper. 'No piece is exactly the same because the drawings are hand-placed,’ she says. Finally Davey paints little lustre dots – the trail of the bee, for example – and the piece goes in for its final firing.

On a little table outside the studio Davey’s mother, Gill, sits cutting up her daughter’s transfer designs. Her father, John, a conservation officer, also regularly helps out. 'He’s a thwarted artist, really,’ Davey says. 'He helps make the coasters – I get him rolling out the clay; he says it’s good for his arms.’ Her parents are planning to move to Bath from Guildford to help more as the business expands.

The speed at which her business has taken off has been 'a steep learning curve’, Davey says. 'But it’s lovely being able to walk down to the Highgrove shop in Bath and see all my products on display. And the girls in the shop love telling customers that their new mug was made in a garage.’

Darren Hill

On top of Darren Hill’s filing cabinet is a half-finished willow basket that the Duchess of Cornwall helped him make last Christmas. Hill’s baskets had just been stocked at Highgrove’s shop, and he was demonstrating willow weaving to the Duchess and the Prince of Wales. 'She was really interested in the technique and had a little go,’ Hill says. 'I keep her basket up there as a reminder.’

The Somerset Willow Company, based in Bridgwater, is one of the few British producers of willow baskets, furniture and hot-air-balloon baskets – a 30ft-long one is near the door ready to be shipped to a safari park in Africa. Along with picnic baskets (£79.95), the company supplies Highgrove with woven-willow wine carriers (£50-55), log carriers (£115) and duck’s nests (£75), a product that the company brought out of its archives at Highgrove’s request. 'I remember them being made when I was a 16-year-old apprentice,’ Hill, 49, says. 'We stopped because there was no demand, but Highgrove asked us to bring them back.’

A duck’s nest, which takes about two hours to make, is traditionally formed from living willow and planted into the banks of lakes and rivers to encourage ducks to lay. Highgrove has several of them planted around the estate and sells them in the shop during the winter months, when the willow is dormant. At other times similar-looking duck’s nests, which are made from cut-and-dried willow but cannot be planted, are stocked. Four have been sold so far.

Hill’s grandfather Edward founded the company in 1959. Orphaned at 14, Edward had been sent to work on a farm, where a few months later he was crippled when a horse fell on him. Needing a job that did not involve using his legs, he became a basket-maker’s apprentice, eventually setting up his own business with his son Aubrey. Aubrey, Darren’s father, retired last year at the age of 76. Darren’s son Anthony, 25, also works at the company, managing website sales.

The company employs 18 basket-weavers, all men, because of the physical nature of the work (although Hill does want to encourage more women to enter the trade). It takes more than four years to become a skilled basket-maker, and Hill has seven apprentices, who are dotted around the factory floor sitting on cushions weaving baskets in the traditional manner. 'It can be a shock for young people who have been on computers all their lives,’ Hill says. 'It takes about six months for your hands to get used to the work.’

The company has seen its turnover increase from £300,000 10 years ago to £980,000 today, helped in part by an offshoot company, Somerset Willow Growers, which Hill set up in 2005 to grow his own willow after most of his local suppliers 'packed it in’. Somerset Willow Growers now has 30 acres of land and six staff; some of the willow used for the Highgrove products is grown on the Highgrove estate.

More than 70 per cent of Hill’s business is producing environmentally friendly willow coffins, which can be customised: 'We did the Olympic logo for an oarsman and the BA logo for a woman who was high up in British Airways,’ Hill says. Pink is also popular. Each coffin, of which they sell 160 per month direct to undertakers, takes about 12 hours to make. 'It’s nice to think that you’re helping someone on their last journey.’